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Reinforcement learning (RL) has demonstrated impressive performance in various areas such as video games and robotics. However, ensuring safety and stability, which are two critical properties from a control perspective, remains a…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2023-10-02 Liqun Zhao , Konstantinos Gatsis , Antonis Papachristodoulou

Continuous-time nonlinear optimal control problems hold great promise in real-world applications. After decades of development, reinforcement learning (RL) has achieved some of the greatest successes as a general nonlinear control design…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2023-07-19 Brent A. Wallace , Jennie Si

Adaptive control has focused on online control of dynamic systems in the presence of parametric uncertainties, with solutions guaranteeing stability and control performance. Safety, a related property to stability, is becoming increasingly…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2023-09-12 Johannes Autenrieb , Anuradha M. Annaswamy

Safe operation is essential for deploying robots in human-centered 3D environments. Soft continuum manipulators provide passive safety through mechanical compliance, but still require active control to achieve reliable collision avoidance.…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-03-23 Kiwan Wong , Maximillian Stölzle , Wei Xiao , Daniela Rus

This manuscript considers the problem of ensuring stability and safety during formation control with distributed multi-agent systems in the presence of parametric uncertainty in the dynamics and limited communication. We propose an…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2026-03-24 Jose A. Solano-Castellanos , Peter A. Fisher , Anuradha Annaswamy

We consider safety-critical multi-agent systems with distributed control architectures and potentially varying network topologies. While learning-based distributed control enables scalability and high performance, a lack of formal safety…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2026-04-01 Jonas Ohnemus , Alexandre Didier , Ahmed Aboudonia , Andrea Carron , Melanie N. Zeilinger

Recent advances in the reinforcement learning (RL) literature have enabled roboticists to automatically train complex policies in simulated environments. However, due to the poor sample complexity of these methods, solving RL problems using…

Robotics · Computer Science 2022-11-21 Tyler Westenbroek , Fernando Castaneda , Ayush Agrawal , Shankar Sastry , Koushil Sreenath

Control Barrier Functions (CBFs) is an important tool used to address situations with multiple concurrent control objectives, such as safety and goal convergence. In this paper we investigate the similarities between CBFs and so-called…

Robotics · Computer Science 2021-09-06 Petter Ögren

This paper is motivated by controllers developed for autonomous vehicles which occasionally result into conditions where safety is no longer guaranteed. We develop an exact-time safety recovery framework for any control-affine nonlinear…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2026-04-14 Yingqing Chen , Christos G. Cassandras , Wei Xiao , Anni Li

Safety-critical whole-body robot control demands reactive methods that ensure collision avoidance in real-time. Complementarity constraints and control barrier functions (CBF) have emerged as core tools for ensuring such safety constraints,…

Optimal control methods provide solutions to safety-critical problems but easily become intractable. Control Barrier Functions (CBFs) have emerged as a popular technique that facilitates their solution by provably guaranteeing safety,…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-02-21 Ehsan Sabouni , H. M. Sabbir Ahmad , Vittorio Giammarino , Christos G. Cassandras , Ioannis Ch. Paschalidis , Wenchao Li

We propose a constricting Control Barrier Function (CBF) framework for prescribed-time control of control-affine systems with input constraints. Given a system starting outside a target safe set, we construct a time-varying safety tube that…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-03-19 Darshan Gadginmath , Ahmed Allibhoy , Fabio Pasqualetti

This paper addresses the challenge of synthesizing safety-critical controllers for high-order nonlinear systems, where constructing valid Control Barrier Functions (CBFs) remains computationally intractable. Leveraging layered control, we…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2026-04-06 Jixian Liu , Enrique Mallada

In this work, we consider the problem of designing a safety filter for a nonlinear uncertain control system. Our goal is to augment an arbitrary controller with a safety filter such that the overall closed-loop system is guaranteed to stay…

Robotics · Computer Science 2022-04-11 Lukas Brunke , Siqi Zhou , Angela P. Schoellig

This paper considers enforcing safety and stability of dynamical systems in the presence of model uncertainty. Safety and stability constraints may be specified using a control barrier function (CBF) and a control Lyapunov function (CLF),…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-03-17 Kehan Long , Yinzhuang Yi , Jorge Cortes , Nikolay Atanasov

Adaptive control provides closed-loop stability and reference tracking for uncertain dynamical systems through online parameter adaptation. These properties alone, however, do not ensure safety in the sense of forward invariance of state…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2026-03-17 Johannes Autenrieb , Peter A. Fisher , Anuradha Annaswamy

This paper develops a novel control synthesis method for safe stabilization of control-affine systems as a Differential Complementarity Problem (DCP). Our design uses a control Lyapunov function (CLF) and a control barrier function (CBF) to…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-01-04 Yinzhuang Yi , Shumon Koga , Bogdan Gavrea , Nikolay Atanasov

Control Barrier Functions (CBFs) have emerged as a powerful tool in the design of safety-critical controllers for nonlinear systems. In modern applications, complex systems often involve the feedback interconnection of subsystems evolving…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-04-03 Stefano Di Gregorio , Guido Carnevale , Giuseppe Notarstefano

Reinforcement learning (RL) has proven to be particularly effective in solving complex decision-making problems for a wide range of applications. Safe reinforcement learning refers to a class of constrained problems where the constraint…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2026-05-13 Dhruv Singh Kushwaha , Zoleikha Abdollahi Biron

In this work, we establish different control design approaches for discrete-time systems, which build upon the notion of finite-step control Lyapunov functions (fs-CLFs). The design approaches are formulated as optimization problems and…

Dynamical Systems · Mathematics 2019-08-27 Navid Noroozi , Roman Geiselhart , Lars Grüne , Fabian R. Wirth